The British Royal Navy heavy cruiser Devon, a behemoth with a displacement of more than 13,300 tons. The armor of 110 mm thick and built-in lightning protection compartment gave her perfect protection, while the eight huge 204 mm main guns were enough to send enemy ships of the same level as her into the cold hell.

The powerful steam function in her body can provide 80,000 horsepower, which allows her to make various shocking maneuvering actions like a destroyer and give her a maximum speed of more than thirty knots.

"This is a perfect cruiser." Captain Devon, Colonel Carcent, looked at the majestic cannon under the bridge and sighed proudly. He imagined himself commanding the elite warship to send the damn Nazi warships one by one into the sea.

"Captain Carterson, how far are we from our destination now?" A voice pulled the captain back from his dream.

The Navy Colonel felt a little dissatisfied, and he turned his head to wonder who had broken his dream.

The first thing that came into Carterson's eyes was a straight yellow-brown military uniform, with two neat rows of medals on his chest pocket, a fiery red collar, a beautiful crown on his shoulder and a diamond-shaped star logo proving the identity of the owner of the military uniform.

"Ah, Lieutenant Colonel Sanders, why are you here? Is there anything you need to ask me?" Carterson said immediately with a smile on his face.

"Nothing is wrong, Captain." Sanders knew that the question before him was vain, and the naval officer didn't listen to anything at all.

"I just want to ask when will we get to our destination."

"Oh, my dear Mr. Lieutenant Colonel, at our current pace, we will probably be able to reach our destination tomorrow morning." Carterson replied with a smile.

"This, Captain, you know the importance of the mission we are doing, and I hope to be able to land on this night. Can you speed up our progress and reach our landing location before midnight today?" Sanders frowned.

"It's hard to do, Lieutenant Colonel. You have to know that we are now on the edge of the enemy-controlled seas and are close to the minefields laid by the Norwegians. I won't be surprised if I encounter any trouble here." Carterson turned around and looked at the vast sea outside the window and said.

"If possible, of course I would like to pass through this place where dangers are hidden everywhere. But the current situation does not allow me to do so. We must be guarded against enemy submarine attacks, and the intelligence says that the enemy may send submarines to patrol this area. If we move forward at full speed, we will not be able to use our underwater listeners, and our own noise will completely cover up the sound of German submarines.

Moreover, the noise emitted by ships at high speed is likely to expose our location to those submarines. We are not worried about any German submarines that are not afraid of death dare to attack us, but they will bring those damn German torpedo boats and planes. You must know that it will be dangerous to be attacked by torpedo boats and bombers in such places. I don’t want to use my warship to take such unnecessary risks, so now we can only move forward at this speed." Carterson looked helpless.

"But Captain Carterson, you must understand the arduousness of our mission, and even London attaches great importance to this operation." Sanders felt that carrying out the general backstage of this mission might add a little urgency to the stubborn naval colonel. But he obviously failed, and Carterson didn't seem to care about this at all.

"Lieutenant Colonel, I know the importance of this mission, and I know how it will help our empire. However, this is on the sea, not in London. This is my warship, my fleet. You are responsible for your mission, and I am also responsible for my warship. On land, you have to obey the orders of your army, but you have to obey my command at sea. And the time of this mission does not clearly specify when we must arrive, and the planners also understand the difficulty of sailing at sea. My mission is to send you and your soldiers safely to Norway and then safely take you back to Britain. The fleet must reach its destination in seclusion and safety, and now this speed is the limit to ensure that I complete this mission. I must bring this precious fleet back to Britain intact. Now the Royal Navy has no power to consume anymore." Carterson said seriously.

"Ming... I understand." Sanders knew that he could not convince the naval officer, so he had to give up his opinion for the time being.

"Then I'll say goodbye. I'll also make my soldiers ready to land. By the way, you said you'll arrive early tomorrow morning, right?"

"Yes, Mr. Lieutenant Colonel, I can assure you of this." Carterson felt very uncomfortable with the army officer not only using London to suppress himself, but also trying to interfere with him in his actions of the fleet command. He picked up the telescope and pretended to observe the sea surface, and replied coldly without looking back. His tone also added a hint of impatientness to his usual gentleness.

Sanders heard the meaning of the captain's tone, and he didn't want to make things boring anymore, so he turned around and left the bridge after giving a standard military salute.

When Sanders walked down the stairs inside the bridge, he found that his adjutant was waiting for him under the stairs with several other officers.

"Sir, how are you asking?" his adjutant asked.

"We landed in early tomorrow morning to prepare all the soldiers, and after dinner all the officers came to my room for a meeting to discuss the login details."

"What! Tomorrow morning, don't we need to act during the day? What did this captain think? Under the eyes of the Germans, it's not for us to die." The adjutant said loudly.

"Enough, Captain Willis, you have to pay attention to your tone. You are attacking a senior officer." Sanders stopped his adjutant from continuing to complain, and then he lowered his voice and said, "If you have anything to my room, let's talk about it. Is there a bad impact on the decision made by a senior officer here? Do you understand?"

"As for orders, Lieutenant Colonel." The adjutant nodded quickly to agree.

Sanderson took his men out of the bridge and walked along the deck towards the officer's cabin at the stern of the ship.

"Now I feel really bored. We are walking back and forth on the sea, and I doubt whether we can really reach our destination tomorrow morning." An officer said, looking at a destroyer turning in front of the battleship.

"I believe that the captain's words, he should be responsible for what he promised. If we say that the Royal Navy regards honor as life like us, he will definitely fulfill his promise." Sanderson also turned his head and looked at the destroyer.

Suddenly, a sharp eagle sounded suddenly from the destroyer in the distance. Even if it was so far away, it still sounded heart-wrenching.

"What happened? Have you discovered the enemy?" The army officers turned around and gathered by the railings of the deck. Everyone looked at the warship that was screaming wildly in confusion.

"Essential report, Essential report, all personnel take their place, and everyone arrives at their respective combat positions. Essential report, Essential report." At this time, the command of the first mate came from the huge speaker at the top of the bridge, and then the Devon began to pull out the deafening battle report.

The deck of the warship began to become chaotic in an instant. Countless sailors emerged from their hatches of large and small sizes, and rushed towards their respective posts. The anti-aircraft gunners hurriedly took out the shells from the bullet box, then turned the cāo vertical wheel desperately, and the dense muzzles of the 40mm anti-aircraft gun pointed straight into the air and searched for the traces of the enemy planes. The huge turret of the secondary gun also began to rotate slowly, and the muzzles pointed in any direction that might encounter the enemy. The sailors shouted and encouraged each other, no one asked, no one was confused, and everyone was excited to be able to participate in the battle. The Royal Navy still maintained their pride and high morale. The entire warship was now like an angry hedgehog, revealing its sharp spikes in all directions.

"Where is the enemy? Why didn't I see it?" Captain Willis asked Sanders.

"I don't know either, I didn't find anything." Sanders looked puzzled. He looked at the destroyer that had stopped turning and was desperately trying to turn in the other direction, not understanding what was going on.

"May I ask, have we encountered an enemy?" An officer under Sanders grabbed an old sailor who was running past them and asked anxiously.

"I don't know either. You'd better go to the officer's room. The deck is very unsafe. Please let me go quickly. I still have a job, sir." The old sailor struggled to break free from the officer's palm and hurriedly ran towards the tail of the ship.

"He was right, let's go to the cabin. We stayed on the deck without any help except to give the soldiers the trouble."

Sanders led his officers to hurry toward the nearby officers' restaurant. Sanders found that the deck of the Devon suddenly began to tremble, and the warships obviously accelerated. Devon is now trying to turn.

"Now I think something is wrong." Sanders stopped. The soldiers' special premonition of danger made him feel that he must be in big trouble this time.

"Boom!" A dull explosion sounded from not far away. Sanders quickly turned his head and looked at the place where the explosion occurred. As a result, he only saw a thick column of water falling from the side of the destroyer that was turning in panic. The destroyer's hull was obviously twisted by some force and then returned to its original state, but the harsh noise of the steel friction still clearly reached Sanders' ears. The scene in front of him shocked the army lieutenant colonel.

"Is it a shelling?" Sanders looked carefully at the nearby sea surface to know where the shelling came from.

At this moment, another dull explosion sounded from the destroyer, and a huge water column rose again from the side of the battleship. The destroyer was shot and left the water surface like a huge hand holding her from the sea. The entire battleship instantly turned into an arch bridge and protruded high in the middle. Then in the next second it returned to its original state and smashed it back into the water, causing the water splash even exceeding the height of the mast.

"It's a torpedo!"

Sanders finally understood why the warship turned so panickedly. She was avoiding the threat of approaching from the sea. Unfortunately, she found that this threat was too late, and after the final efforts, she still couldn't escape the disaster.

"God, there is a German submarine here!" Sanders exclaimed: "We were attacked by German submarines."

He stared at the poor destroyer in amazement. Now the destroyer had been torpedoed in half. The stern had been mostly submerged into the sea. The head of the ship had been lifted off the water surface and continued to slowly tilt upwards. Now he could clearly see the red bottom of the ship covered with vines under the waterline of the warship. The surviving sailors cried and fell into the sea from the gradually vertical deck, and then were sucked into the hull by the vortex rolled up by the hull. The sailors who escaped this disaster were trying hard to swim out of the range of the wreck. They all knew that the next vortex would be much larger than this and that would be the final struggle of the destroyer.

Devon did not slow her down, and she continued her turn. Sanders watched the destroyer shake first on the sea, and then sank to the bottom of the sea at an incredible speed with the whine of metal twists and breaks.

Devon quickly passed by the wreckage of the poor destroyer, and now she was powerless to the sailors who were struggling and calling for help in the sea, because the underwater demon who had sunk them must still be peeping at all. She could not stop and save these poor people at risk of being attacked. The sailors could only throw life-saving equipment into the sea, and shouted loudly to encourage their comrades who were struggling in the water.

"Damn German submarines, these poor sailors, can't we help them?" Looking at the tragic scene in front of us, Willis called Sanders in grief and anger. But Sanders did not answer his question. He looked at the people and bowed his head without saying a word, his eyes were filled with hatred. He secretly swore in his heart that one day he would pay the blood debt from the Germans.

At this moment, two violent explosions came from the stern of the ship. The two explosions occurred almost at the same time, but what surprised Sanders was that it sounded like they came from different directions.

"Lieutenant Colonel, our other two destroyers were also shot." An officer shouted loudly. At some point, he climbed onto the platform of the high aircraft catapult at the stern of the ship. Now he shouted at the two destroyers rising from a distance.

"How could it be like this?" Sanders murmured at the two warships that were 1,500 meters apart.

"It must be like this. We must have encountered more than just a submarine. Oh my God, we just entered a carefully designed ambush circle so stupidly."

Sanders remembered that his father had told him the same experience. During World War I, his father was a naval officer. As a result, his fleet entered an ambush circle composed of two German submarines while transporting them to France. As a result, the entire fleet was sent to the bottom of the sea by the Germans. Every time he talked about that terrible night, the old man's eyes were filled with fear, and then he was full of tears. He was the only survivor of the massacre, where he lost all his friends and subordinates, as well as his pride and confidence.

Is it my turn now? Sanderson felt his scalp tingling, and his horror impression of German submarines was deeply rooted in the minds of every generation of British people who had passed that war, including those who came from the post-war period.

"It's not the last war, and this is not a merchant ship without resistance. Now he is riding on the most elite warship of the Royal Navy. My father's experience will definitely not come to his head again." Sanderson comforted himself, but when he looked up at the two burning destroyers, he couldn't help but start to pound again.

The continuous blows have made the Devonshire panic. Now she has lost most of her escort force. What’s even more terrifying is that all this happened in just two minutes, which makes the heavy cruiser a little helpless. The once passionate morale disappeared without a trace in the face of this cruel reality.

There are only two options in front of Devon. One is to abandon those struggling compatriots and speed up leaving this place of trouble. The second option is to lead the remaining destroyers and German submarines to fight to the death to save their compatriots and the Royal Navy.

Sanders ran towards the bridge desperately, trying to stop him before the stubborn Carterson made that wrong stupid decision. Because he had a vague premonition in his mind, which path the colonel would choose, a path that might push everyone into hell.

Sanders felt a strong ominous premonition in his heart, and what worried him was that his premonition had always been very accurate.

If there is anything else that can scare Sanders now, it is that he... can't swim.

;
Chapter completed!